22 Briefing War in Ukraine The Economist February 26th 2022
aratists be provided with a level of autono-
my and veto power that would stop the rest
of Ukraine from moving towards the eu,
economically, and nato, militarily. Uk-
raine would be disunited, fragmented and
unable to assert itself as a unitary state:
just the sort of neighbour Mr Putin wants
for Russia. As Bruno Tertrais of frs, a
French think-tank, puts it, he “seeks a form
of castration of Ukraine, to deprive it of its
military potential”.
By recognising the republics as inde-
pendent Russia abandoned the route to a
neutered Ukraine that the never imple-
mented Minsk Accords had offered it on
paper. Its alternative route was to insert a
pre-Russian regime by force. If it did not do
so, its military action would incur the
heaviest sanctions the West was willing to
impose without delivering the strategic re-
alignment Mr Putin wanted; big costs for
no real benefit.
Ukraine’s armed forces are unlikely to
withstand this assault for long. The first
round of Russian air and missile strikes
was almost certainly intended to destroy
Ukraine’s integrated air defence network;
one of the targets hit was an air-defence
battery in Vasilkiv, a town near Kyiv. If Rus-
sian warplanes have command of the skies
its paratroopers and helicopter-borne forc-
es will be able to bypass large concentra-
tions of Ukrainian soldiers in order seize
key objectives well behind the front lines,
going back on themselves to mop up pock-
ets of resistance later. On the morning of
February 24th there were reports that Rus-
sia had attempted to land paratroopers at
Gostomel airport outside Kyiv. Ukraine
claimed to have shot down some of the he-
licopters and captured Russian personnel
How quickly the government might
fall, and whether Russian troops would
need to enter Kyiv to bring it down, is hard
to predict. One unknown factor is how ma-ny Ukrainians will resist—and how many
will collaborate. “Meeting with Ukrainian
security officials there is a widespread ac-
knowledgment that many of their col-
leagues—even in some quite senior posi-
tions—are working for or sympathetic to
Russia”, Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds of
the Royal United Services Institute, a
think-tank, wrote in a report based on in-
terviews with Ukrainian military and in-
telligence officials conducted this month.
They say that last summer thefsb, Rus-
sia’s security service, created a 200-strong
Ukraine team, the 9th Directorate. In De-
cember it reportedly held war-games with
the special forces and airborne troops who
would lead any invasion. The report also
claims that there Russian special forces
have two companies, each of 60 to 80 men,
in Kyiv and ready to strike: “Senior Ukrai-
nian officials are clear that they expect,
and have planned for, a decapitation strat-
egy against them.”Something new to occupy their minds
If Russia is to keep the puppet it presum-
ably aims to install in power, rather than
see them driven out as Mr Yanukovych
was, it may well need not just to invade Uk-
raine but to occupy at least some of the
country for some time. The very idea
sounds outlandish; even Western politi-
cians familiar with the intelligence seem
hard put to credit it.
Nevertheless, the Russian forces in a
position to invade and the auxiliary forces
which may follow behind them, such as
units of Mr Zolotov’s national guard, “ap-
pear more than sufficient to attempt an oc-
cupation of Ukraine's eastern regions”, ar-
gues Michael Kofman, an expert on Rus-
sia’s armed forces at cna, a think-tank.
Ukraine’s eastern areas plus Kyiv amount
to only 18m inhabitants, he notes; the coast
adds another 3m. That would give Russia acomparable force-density ratio—the num-
ber of troops relative to the population—to
that which 177,000 troops gave America
when it occupied Iraq.
And Russia enjoys advantages that
those Americans did not. Its army does not
suffer from the same language barriers; it
understands the terrain; and it will be
“much more ruthless in the application of
violence”, notes Mr Watling. The 9th Direc-
torate has been working on lists of poten-
tial collaborators who might take on gov-
ernment roles—as well as people who
might lead the resistance.
As Mr Tertrais notes, Russia’s aims are
limited in principle, “but wars have a ten-
dency to not follow the path traced by
those who launched them”. That is not
least because others get a vote. “It is in our
collective interest that Russia should ulti-
mately fail and be seen to fail”, Boris John-
son, Britain’s prime minister, declared on
February 19th.
Much more severe sanctions on the part
of the West and its allies could be a part of
that response. In the first tranche, trig-
gered by Mr Putin’s speech on the 21st,
American imposed “full blocking sanc-
tions” against veb, an economic-develop-
ment bank, and Promsvyazbank, which fi-
nances Russia’s defence sector, freezing
their assets in America, prohibiting Amer-
ican individuals and companies from
making deals with them, and blocking
their access to dollars. Further institutions
may now expect the same treatment.
The eu sanctions followed similar lines
to America’s, showing that their planning
had been more closely aligned than many
had thought. The most eye-catching de-
monstration of solidarity was Germany’s
decision to mothball Nord Stream 2, a
pipeline which was to have supplied it
with Russian gas by a route that bypassed
Ukraine. Because no gas yet flows through
the pipeline this will have no prompt eco-
nomic effect. But it heralds a profound
shift in both German energy policy and its
attitude towards Russia, where it has long
argued that interdependence could be a
foundation for peace. “The situation today
is fundamentally different,” said Olaf
Scholz, Germany’s chancellor.
Many observers criticised those first
sanctions as under-ambitious. The coun-
tries involved said they had to keep some
in reserve to deter further aggression. Now
they will have to show whether what they
kept back measures up. Mr Kuleba,
Ukraine’s foreign minister, has called for
“devastating” sanctions on Russia, includ-
ing its exclusion from the swiftsystem for
international financial transactions.
Attacks in cyberspace are also a pos-
sibility. “There's a great temptation to
reach for cyber operations,” says Marcus
Willett, a former deputy head of Britain’s
On their way signal-intelligence agency, gchq. “They